The Effigy
by Nyx Fixx
Summary: Remus Lupin tries to stave off a recurring dream by recalling a very strange spell Sirius Black once cast
1. Chapter 1

**The Effigy**

Nyx Fixx

December, 2005

**Pairing**: Remus Lupin/Sirius Black

**Rating/Warnings:** Rated R, explicit adult content, character death

**Word Count:** 19,744, six chapters

**Summary:** Remus tries to hold off a recurring dream and recalls an odd spell Sirius once cast.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of these characters, events, or plotlines. No profit is being made.

**Dedication:** To my Best Beta, profcricket, on the occasion of her birthday.

The Effigy

1.

Remus had experienced this dream many times. Though there were often minor variations in one small detail or another, the essential shape of the recurring nightmare remained fixed. It always started with him prowling the silent rooms of some large, gloomy building, his feet falling against floorboards in oddly muffled thuds, and the air around him heavy with the weight of a terrible storm brewing outside.

In this occurrence of the dream, the corridors he wandered alone were the all-too-familiar halls of 12 Grimmauld Place; on other nights, in other dreams, it had sometimes been a deserted dockside warehouse, or one of the closed-off wings at Hogwarts, or the upper floors of a Muggle paper mill he had once visited in Poland. But tonight it was a familiar, haunted house in London, and Remus was walking the halls again.

The corridors and rooms he passed through were dark, lit only by the occasional candle and the bleak daylight that filtered wanly through the windows. It was a pale, grey light that cast sickly greenish tones on all it touched, too oppressed by the coming storm to penetrate far past the windowpanes, too weak to cast shadow, illuminating nothing inside the house. This heavy light, this heavy air, deadened sound and flattened color, and when Remus passed by an opened sitting room door, he saw a bright scarlet cloak that had been discarded on the back of a loveseat inside, deprived of all its brightness and only a muddy splash of rusty brown in the deserted room.

There was only relentless gloom and relentless fading, and the relentlessly soft, echoless thudding of his footsteps, pacing slowly through one empty space after another. That and the pricking of the fine hairs on his arms and the backs of his hands rising, prickling against the crushing _feel_ of the air around him; an atmosphere pregnant with the malignant promise of a storm that, when it broke at last, might be enough to drown the world.

But the storm would not break just yet, Remus knew. It was too early – the storm had never yet made good on its threat in this stage of the dream. Though it might press, moist and close and vaguely sickening against the glass of the windows, it was still too early for the lightning to strike. He would have to walk on.

He passed down one hall and up another, and walked through many empty rooms on his way to other silent spaces. As he came to a pair of double oaken doors that led into a formal dining room, he could hear the low sound of speech, the tones as dead and flat as the sound of his own footsteps. Inside the doors, he knew, he would always see a figure seated alone at a table, head in hands, muttering. Remus walked through the doors, looking, with an odd species of reluctant curiosity, toward the table, to see the expected figure. In all the recurrences of this dream that Remus had known, the figure at the table, grumbling to himself, was as malignant as the gathering maelstrom outside, though it was not always the same person. Sometimes it was Mundungus Fletcher, sometimes Argus Filch, and quite often it was Severus Snape. On one memorable occasion it had been Peter Pettigrew, weeping silently as he'd whispered his dark confessions to the empty dinner plate on the table before him.

The figure would never acknowledge Remus' presence as he would pass, no matter who it turned out to be. Remus would always consider speaking to the figure, and would always decide against it, for fear that the figure might answer.

This time, a shaggy, ill-kempt head of graying hair was bowed above the table, dirty fingers cradling brutal features, a low growl in the muttering, softly mournful voice. A silvery spike of cold fear and flat hate speared Remus through his guts, and he stumbled a step in his passage through the room.

Fenrir Greyback. Grumbling to himself and crying into his empty glass of beer.

"Serves me right," Greyback was muttering monotonously to his barren plate. "Serves me right. Bloody well serves me right."

_So it does, you evil baby-killing fuck_, Remus thought, and before he could pass through and away from Greyback and into the rest of his dream, Remus shuddered himself out of the dream entirely and into a kind of soupy, half dazed waking.

He clumsily pushed twisted and sweat-damp bedclothes off his limbs, freeing himself from their constrictive embrace. He did not often wake before this dream would play out to its ultimate conclusion, and he found himself hoping that if he could stay awake long enough, the dream would dissipate into the insubstantial wisps it was truly composed of before he returned to slumber. With luck, he could pass the rest of his night in relative peace.

He thought, for a moment, about the whole phenomenon of recurring dreams, of the strange way the subconscious mind could sometimes fix on obsessions virtually unknown to the waking mind, playing them out in dream again and again, always seeking some mysterious resolution that could never be found.

Where did such dreams come from? And how might they be banished for good? He had, off and on over the years, sought the answers to these questions, hoping to exile the dream, and be done with it. But every trick and curative he tried against it had failed; he did not know.

His own recurring dream did have some origins in his waking memory; certainly he could identify some of them. Many years ago, he had experienced one of the most bizarre encounters of his life, and had learned things about himself and about the ineffable oddity of the world he lived in that he might well have been content enough not to know.

It was a memory that Remus had simply left isolated in one of the more remote, less inhabited corners of his psyche, vivid and easily recallable, so rare and outré that it was as precious to him as it was disturbing. He rarely took it out and examined it anew, yet, based on the many recurrences of his dream, it seemed that perhaps he had been vaguely haunted by the memory all along.

On this night, hoping to hold off sleep and its freight of disturbing illusions for another few minutes, Remus allowed his mind to seek out this one memory once more, drifting with disturbing ease into times and places and events that had occurred almost fifteen years past.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Remus Lupin had been a young man in what he thought of now as the grim old days: Voldemort's power was just beginning to grow; the strength and number of the Death Eaters was virtually unknown; and the conflict that would eventually erupt into outright civil war was still largely covert. His young manhood had been spent with all his closest friends; but instead of living care-free they had each played parts in a deadly game of spy-versus-spy, each working for the Order of the Phoenix when it had still been new.

Lily and James, newly married, had also wedded their particular talents for charms and transfiguration, and had made themselves a formidable team. They had already come into direct conflict with Voldemort himself once, and had successfully defied him.

Peter Pettigrew, with his affable manner and plump, non-threatening persona, had been uniquely suited to keeping his ears open without attracting much attention himself; the Order had set him to listening in a low-level job in the Ministry of Magic. Peter had been largely instrumental in the Order's discovery of a fairly extensive Death Eater intelligence network within the Ministry itself, though he had not been able to learn the identity of the central spymaster who ran the ring.

Remus had been working on a new technique for reaching the broken minds of Order members and others who had sustained severe spell damage, combining elements of his working knowledge of Legilimency with some of his own unique, hard-earned abilities. He had believed he was nearing the achievement of a successful methodology, and would be ready to apply his theories in real life soon.

Sirius had wanted to be an Auror, but was well aware that his notorious family name alone would have been more than enough to keep the doors of the Ministry firmly shut to him. He did not even try to apply for admittance into the Auror training program; no Black could expect to be given _any_ Ministry position during this time of growing suspicion and paranoia, and especially not while Barty Crouch was Minister.

Sirius had done his best to swallow his own frustration and anger over a situation that, while dreadfully unfair, could not be remedied, so he poured all his passion into working for the Order instead. Because he was an unregistered Animagus, and because his alternate form, a dog, was a common enough animal to pass unnoticed in most situations, Sirius mostly specialized in infiltration operations. Though no one other than his closest friends in the Order knew how he did it, he could, thanks to Padfoot, often get inside places that were impenetrable to other wizards; he had managed to intercept quite a few secrets and had derailed a number of Death Eater plans in this way. The irony of this, that he specialized in passing through closed doors for the Order partly because he could never open certain doors for himself, had not been lost on him.

It had been this, in part, that had led Sirius to the creation of the new spell that was at the heart of Remus' peculiar memory. Sirius had developed a bit of a reputation amongst their enemies, a sort of tissue of whispers that suggested that no sensitive information should be passed and no secret meeting should be undertaken without first determining precisely where the elder Black son was. To the Death Eaters, he seemed to be a bit like smoke, with ears in the unlikeliest places yet almost impossible to accurately track himself. A sort of a superstitious mystique had grown up around him among them, and though Sirius often laughed with contempt at the way Voldemort's followers reflected their master's rather credulous ways, he did not appreciate the way the extra attention had begun to hamper his own operations for the Order.

So he started work on some secretive project that, he had told Remus, might solve this problem: but he said nothing about the details, claiming it was too early to tell if the magic he was developing would work or not. All Remus knew was that he had taken to poring over a variety of antique grimoires, had laid in a supply of different aromatic woods and incenses, and, oddly, had destroyed large numbers of small, inexpensive mirrors in his research. Remus would often find the silvery shards in their rubbish bins on mornings after the dark of the moon and other significant astronomical configurations.

Sirius had been working on his project for some six months when Shacklebolt, the young Auror, had positively identified Ludo Bagman as one of the links in the Death Eater network at the Ministry. Most of the Order agreed that Bagman was probably an unknowing dupe and was highly unlikely to have the faintest idea that he was working, indirectly, for Voldemort. The consensus had been that Bagman's genius was strictly limited to Quidditch, and off the pitch, he could be a bit of an idiot, gullible and trusting. But he _could_, however, possibly lead them to the mysterious central figure in the network, whom Pettigrew, despite all his efforts, had still been unable to uncover. So the Order had begun to watch Bagman carefully, tracking his every encounter with everyone, social or otherwise, within the Ministry and without.

Unfortunately, all their surveillance came to nothing. They learned that Bagman had something of a gambling problem, and was a bit over-fond of pub-crawling for a professional athlete, but they were unable to discover who any of his contacts were, since the flow of intelligence he had been passing had dwindled to a trickle of purely innocuous facts in a suspiciously short time. As Moody had put it at an Order meeting: "Fire and Brimstone! They know we're watching the damn fool! How in _hell_ did they find out?"

Dumbledore had been the one to suggest that they choose some small secret of their own and deliberately leak it directly to Bagman, thus making it possible to see who he talked to and how the specific secret would make its way into the Ministry network. It was like passing a phony Galleon to a mark in a counterfeiting scam, Caradoc Dearborn had said. But this plan could hardly yield results if the Death Eaters were aware that Bagman was being watched. The trick, everyone agreed, was how to make Voldemort's agents believe it was safe to contact Bagman. Remus had said it was an interesting problem in misdirection.

And then Sirius had piped up.

"I think I might be able to handle the… misdirection part of it," he'd said. "I've been working on something…"

"That odd little project of yours?" Remus had asked him, interested. "The one you've been so closed-mouthed about?"

"Well…maybe. We'll see. I _think_ it's ready, anyway. Put me and … and … Remus on Bagman's tail for the time being, all right Albus? Just us, us exclusively."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Black," argued Dorcas Meadows. "They'll make you at once! It's gotten so they won't even blow their noses unless they've pinned down your exact location first. They watch _you_ more than they watch any of us!"

James had been looking at Sirius intently. "I think, Dorcas…" he'd said, pausing for a moment. "I think that's the idea. Sirius?"

"I imagine there must be _some_ use for the high profile the bloody wankers have given me, yes, James. I think I may have a way to fox 'em, in any case."

"Have you put together some new spell, Sirius?" Peter had asked, in admiring tones. "You're so good at that. Something clever to throw them off the track? What is it?"

But Sirius had declined to say, claiming that it was all very new and he did not know for certain if it would work and he'd rather just play it out in the field first, like test driving a new broomstick. Afterward, at home and in the privacy of their bedroom, Sirius had explained to Remus that there was clearly a leak somewhere in the Order, and though he just couldn't believe that anyone who had been at the meeting could have been a spy, he had also just not felt comfortable revealing the details of his new magic to anyone but Remus. If nothing else, the new spell was devilishly difficult and the Arithmancy calculations had been awful skull-busters and he was just as likely to have the whole thing blow up in his face as he was to cast it successfully.

In which case James, of course, would never let him live it down.

Dumbledore gave Sirius permission to try his plan, reasoning, no doubt, that even if whatever Sirius was planning didn't work, they would be no worse off than they had been originally. So Sirius and Remus had taken to following Ludo Bagman around, and often being, to Remus' mind, ludicrously obvious about it. Once, in fact, Bagman himself had spotted them in the Leaky Cauldron and had brought a pitcher of butterbeer over to their table and invited himself to join them for the evening, prattling gaily for hours about Britain's prospects at the next World Cup. Meanwhile, Pettigrew had accidentally-on-purpose mentioned to Bagman that he'd seen Albus Dumbledore at the Hogs Head Inn in Hogsmeade on two successive Tuesdays, and that each time he'd engaged a private room and had had some sort of meeting with a number of witches and wizards, and wasn't that a peculiar thing for the Headmaster of Hogwarts to do?

Several weeks of this woefully obvious surveillance went by, Pettigrew's planted information had not yet been passed, and Remus was beginning to get irritable. He did know that Sirius actually _intended_ the Death Eaters to get a damn good look at him and Remus watching Bagman, but it was totally inimical to Remus' rather secretive nature to engage in any ploy that was _meant_ to attract attention. On the evening that they'd followed Bagman to some disreputable dive in Knockturn Alley, Remus had resorted to sarcasm, as he often did when he was feeling grumpy.

"There," he'd said to Sirius, as they stood together on the sidewalk three doors down from the pub Bagman had just entered. "He went inside that rathole down the street. Shall we get out our 'Order of the Phoenix' hats and our 'Ludo Bagman Surveillance Team' badges before we follow him in?"

Sirius had only snorted quietly and taken Remus' arm, swiftly walking him toward a dark, crooked alley down the block. Once they'd entered the alley, Sirius continued to pull Remus further down it, muttering things like "cranky bugger" and "sarcastic git" and so on as they'd moved deeper and deeper into the alley's darkest corners.

They'd turned the last dingy corner and Sirius had pulled Remus along with him as he'd slipped behind some smelly rubbish bins where the alley dead-ended.

"Here," Sirius had said, excited. "This seems private enough."

"Private enough for what?" Remus had asked as he watched Sirius begin to pull various objects out of his pockets.

Sirius looked at him sharply in response, then mumbled "…like waving a red flag in front of a bull…" under his breath, and quickly stole a kiss from Remus. Remus had not been quite sure whether to be annoyed or tickled by this.

"Oh, Padfoot, you're _so_ romantic!" he said, once Sirius had finished with him. "You take me to the nicest places, honestly! Is that a dead fish in that bin over there? Or a dead cat? This seductive setting is positively making my head spin!"

"Complain, complain, complain. There's just no pleasing you, Moony. Anyway, I didn't drag you down here just to snog you, adorable though you are. I think my new spell is finally ready and I'm going to try it out tonight."

"Really? Why tonight? What does it do?"

"Well," Sirius answered, removing things from his pockets once more. "I hope it will make whoever's been watching us watching Bagman _think_ they know exactly where I am. Only they won't, see?"

"Well, no, I don't see, actually."

"You will," Sirius replied, using a shaker jar of some greenish powder to pour out a six-sided pentacle on the ground at their feet.

He began to put various items into the center of the pentacle, things he had taken out of his pockets. A small lock of black hair that looked to Remus like Sirius' own, several sprigs of mistletoe and twigs of beech, a vial of what appeared to be mercury, a small mirror that he peered into once and then quickly wrapped in grey silk before setting it down among the other things. Once his magical pentacle was fully assembled, he took out his wand.

"Or I hope you will, anyway," he added, and drew a glowing sigil in the air over the pentacle with his wand. "Wish me luck. I'm still not sure how it will come out."

"Luck," Remus breathed absently, fascinated.

"_Speculum Incendio_," Sirius said, and everything he had placed in the center of the pentacle burst into pale blue flame.

Remus was able to sense a sort of rushing in the air all around them and knew that Sirius was gathering forces, pulling in magic through all the incorporeal channels he knew how to tap. He could see the effort in Sirius' face, illuminated by the magical fire. The bluish light cast a rather ghastly pallor over his features, and Remus felt a chill at the back of his neck. If not for the intensity of Sirius' glittering eyes and the wild alertness of his expression, the blue firelight would have made him the very image of a corpse.

The fire blazed higher and its light burned brighter, but Remus could feel no warmth from the flames. A cool fire, then, he thought, and his suppositions were confirmed when Sirius thrust his wand-hand fully into the center of the flames and drew a second sigil. The flame instantly tripled in size and became a blue bonfire, as tall as a man.

"_Exsto effigia: praesto ipsemet_!" Sirius shouted, and raised his wand, burning blue, straight up towards the heavens. Instantly the tall blaze whooshed inward, a small, contained implosion within Sirius' pentacle, and then went out with a loud, sharp pop, as though it had been suddenly sucked, light and flame alike, through a hole in the world. The alley they were in went completely black.

Remus heard nothing but the sound of Sirius' hard breathing for a few moments, and he put his hand on Sirius' shoulder in the dark as he fumbled in his own pocket for his wand. The scholar in him automatically translated the Latin of Sirius' incantation into English as he pulled his wand out.

_I appear in effigy; I manifest my very own self_

Remus held his wand out at breast height. "_Lumos_," he said.

There was Sirius beside him, still panting a bit from his exertions and staring toward the pentacle he had drawn. And in that pentacle, there was Sirius too, complete in every detail, gazing calmly back at both of them.

"What…how…how did you..?" Remus murmured, a bit incoherently. "Oh! Now I see why you went through all those mirrors when you were working on this!"

Sirius, or the Sirius at his side, smiled and raked slightly shaky fingers through his hair.

"Yes. I thought I might be able to take a reflection from a mirror and transfigure it into a three dimensional form. It was damnably tricky but…well…it appears I finally got it."

Remus looked once at the figure standing in the pentacle and then back to Sirius, and then did it again. The juxtaposition was so bizarre that Remus felt a mild wave of vertigo, but he could not stop. He moved a bit closer to the magical copy of Sirius, still standing silently, watching.

"Good heavens, Padfoot," he finally said. "There's not a detail missing. It's an exact match."

"Not exact, or so I expect," Sirius said. "It's a reflection, a sort of mirror image. Everything ought to be reversed."

And so it was. Sirius had a small scar on the pad of his right thumb, from when a doxy had bitten him as a child. When Sirius raised his hands before him, palms up, his magical reflection did the same. Remus could see that the scar was there, but on the _left_ thumb.

Remus walked all around the magical figure, examining it from every angle. Its eyes followed him as he moved.

"This is just an amazing piece of magic, Sirius," he finally said. "But, I have to admit … I do find it a bit … eerie."

"And I have to admit, I agree with you. It _is_ a little creepy. It didn't ever occur to me that it might be, in the planning stage, but you're right. Still, it ought to serve its purpose well enough."

"What is its purpose, then?"

"All right, here's the plan I propose. You and the …effigy, I suppose we could call it … you take it over to that pub with you and plant yourself near the door, in plain view. Any Death Eaters who are watching will think they have a definite location on both of us, and then-"

"Where will you be?" Remus asked.

"I'll be Padfoot, just a hungry mutt nosing at the rubbish bins in the back of the pub when Bagman comes out."

"Okay, I see all that, but – but how do you know Bagman will be coming out the back way?"

"Oh, come on now, Remus, how long have we been following this bloke about? He _always_ goes out the back way if he can, trying to duck out on his tab with the innkeepers. We can bank on that part, I'm sure."

Remus nodded. "Yes, that's a reasonable point. All right, so let me see if I have this right – I'll be out front, along with your decoy here," Remus nodded his head at the effigy. "And you'll be-"

"I'll be absolutely free to slink along after Bagman as Padfoot with none the wiser, however long it takes. But I expect it won't take long. I'll be very surprised if someone from that Ministry spy-ring doesn't 'just happen' to meet up with him sometime tonight. I imagine they've been just furious not to have been able to pump him for the most recent intelligence while we've been watching him. But they'll think it's perfectly safe to contact him tonight, because Remus Lupin and 'Sirius Black' will be very visibly sat on their backsides in some appalling pub in Knockturn Alley, swilling rotgut gin and too stupid to realize Bagman snuck out the back!"

Remus smiled, a bit wolfishly. "Come to think of it, Paddy, I _did_ see a few sidewalk tables out in front of the place. Perhaps your twin and I might have a nice little booze-up right out there. Can he … it …can it drink and eat and all that? How much actual consciousness does it have?"

Sirius gazed at his effigy for a moment, still standing calmly in the burnt out pentacle and watching them talk.

"I'm not a hundred percent sure, really," he said. "I designed it to look convincing, so it ought to be able to eat, drink, blink its eyes, move about naturally, even follow directions. But, as to consciousness … hmmm … it _is_ only a kind of a fancied-up mirror-image, after all. I don't expect it can really think much. That's why you need to go with it out there, talk to it, make it look natural. It'll do as you tell it, in any case, I'm sure of that."

"What makes you so certain?" Remus asked.

Sirius put his hand on the back of Remus' neck and stroked gently. "_I_ always do exactly what you tell me, don't I?"

Remus' face quirked into a very private sort of smile. "Sometimes…" he allowed. Then he looked back at the effigy.

"How will I know when it's safe to leave the pub?" he asked Sirius. "That is, how do I know how long to keep playing decoy?"

"Well, that's the sticky part," Sirius admitted. "The spell has a preset time limit. I had to run the Arithmancy formulae a million times, but I was finally able to calculate a predictable duration interval. 'Sirius' here is scheduled to vanish in exactly three hours and forty-five minutes. That's the longest I could make it."

Remus glanced swiftly at the effigy, but it showed no sign of being dismayed to hear the very hour and minute of its impending dissolution. It merely continued to gaze at both of them with a vaguely interested look on its face. Remus' sense of creepiness intensified and he rolled his shoulders a bit, trying to wriggle the small but persistent chill out of his spine.

"Right, then," Remus said, trying to sound brisk. "You've basically given yourself three clear hours to move about freely, while our enemies _think_ they know exactly where you are. It really is brilliant, Sirius. I suppose I'll need to hustle the …thing out of the pub before it disappears in a puff of smoke? Certainly _that_ might seem a little suspicious to anyone watching."

Sirius smiled, a bit uneasily. "No need. It'll return here at the end of its time on its own. To this pentacle, I mean."

Remus felt oddly disturbed to hear this, and he spoke without thinking. "Are you saying it will return to its - its birthplace to – to die?"

Sirius frowned, slightly irritated. "There's no need for such drama, Moony. It's just a spell. It's not-"

"Not what? Not _you_?" Remus interjected.

"Not alive, I was going to say," Sirius snapped. "And, no, it's _not_ me - it's not much more than what I can see in a mirror any day of the week. Now can we _please_ stop frightening ourselves like a pair of superstitious idiots and get _on_ with it? We only have a few hours."

Remus was beginning to feel as though the proposed strategy might have some gaping hole somewhere its logic that he could not … quite … put his finger on. "But…" he started to argue, and then realized he had no clear idea of what his objections actually were. He went on anyway. "But what if-"

"Look. It's simple. You and it just have a seat at the pub, have a chat and a few rounds, make a show of checking on Bagman now and again, and give 'em plenty of opportunity to have a good, long look at … 'me'. Once three hours or so have passed, you say 'good night', and then you leave. All right?"

"You want me to just leave it there alone? And go where?"

"Just go home. I might even be there before you. And maybe I'll have some interesting news about who our good chum Ludo happened to run into tonight after he left the pub, with any luck."

"But what about the …the copy? Shouldn't I stay with him until he comes back here and …you know?" Remus darted another quick glance at the effigy.

Sirius frowned again. "_It _doesn't need you to see it off into the great beyond, damn it, Remus. It's just a spell, I tell you, all smoke and mirrors, literally. Now stop being such a fussbudget, you're giving _me_ the creeps. It'll sort _itself_ out when the time comes!"

"All right, all _right_," Remus muttered, and some of his formless misgiving made the tone of his voice a bit unpleasant. "Stop _barking_ at me. Let's just get it done. I'll see you at home, then?"

Sirius was glancing between the effigy and the mouth of the alley. Then he stopped and looked Remus in the eye.

"Yes, I'll see you at home," he said. "And I'm sorry if I was …barking. I'm just a bit wound up, I guess."

Remus smiled, mollified, and squeezed Sirius' arm. "Wound up? Not _you_, Sirius, surely? The Wizard Who Walks Through Walls?"

Sirius snorted, amused. "Now you're making fun of me, you condescending were-muffin. Don't think I'm so egotistical I can't recognize mockery when I hear it. Anyway, if you must know, the truth is…" Sirius let his remark trail off and gazed again at his magical copy.

"Yes? The truth is?" Remus prompted.

"The truth is - I still can't quite believe I actually managed to do this." He waved his hand at his effigy. "It's … it's not really a very pleasant sort of a spell after all, is it?"

Remus nodded, moving closer to the figure in the pentacle. "No, it's not. But it really is amazing, Sirius, and I do think it'll work, in any case. Let's get underway, shall we? Good luck." He hesitated a moment and then took the effigy's arm.

"Perfectly solid," he commented to Sirius, with a small, rather nervous-looking grin.

"Of course," Sirius answered, also looking a bit unnerved. "Luck to you too, then."

"Ummm … hello," Remus said to the effigy. "I'd like to buy you a drink. Would you walk down this way, please?"

The effigy smiled at him with Sirius' face, Sirius' smile. Remus felt his own mouth automatically smiling back in response and he had to control a small shudder. Then the effigy gazed toward Sirius, a questioning expression on its face.

Sirius swallowed. "Go with Moony," he said to his magical mirror-image.

It stared at Sirius for a moment more, then brought its gaze back to Remus, and once again smiled at him. Remus tightened his hold on its arm by a fraction, and then the two of them started off toward the light of the street at the far end of the alley.

After a few minutes, back in the dark end, a large black dog padded out of the shadows after them.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

In all the years that came after, Remus never forgot the strange three hours he spent with Sirius' magically enhanced reflection, sitting at a shabby sidewalk table in a seedy pub in Knockturn Alley. Remus had ordered them both drinks and he had been relieved to see that Sirius' estimations had been correct; the thing could indeed drink naturally, just as though it was a living being. He had also made sure that the two of them would look convincing to any observers by keeping a covert eye on Bagman (who was seated among some goblins inside the pub), and by "conversing" with the effigy at intervals. Years later, he would have no clear recollection of all the inane prattle he must have babbled at the thing; but he would never forget the interested look on the effigy's face and the polite inclination of its head as it appeared to be listening to him attentively.

Remus, in between keeping up a stream of conversational gibberish, ordering rounds now and again, and playing decoy, also kept a sharp lookout on his wristwatch, making sure he would not exceed the time limit set on his magical companion's existence. The three hours that had been pre-marked as the limit had seemed to him to pass excruciatingly slowly, and he had felt more and more … disturbed as the time had crawled by.

Certainly it was a bizarre and rather unnerving situation, and it was only natural that he should feel a bit nervous; he _was_ engaged in an important espionage operation, after all. But what really disturbed him most was the way he could not quite shake off his feeling of _comfort_ with the thing, his _ease_ with it, his vague feelings of protectiveness and affection toward it. It was only a spell; he knew that intellectually, he knew it wasn't his boyhood friend or his comrade-in-arms; nor was it the treasured companion of his bed and his love. It wasn't _Sirius_. It was only a piece of rather brilliant magic temporarily inhabiting Sirius' well-known shape. But that familiar shape had long since found its accustomed niche in Remus' deepest emotions, and he was learning that what had been designed only to fool the eye could also, given time, begin to fool the heart.

He would often catch himself staring intently at the effigy, searching for the minute differences between the copy and the original, looking for the tiny details that could differentiate Sirius himself from Sirius' embodied mirror-image in Remus' own mind. Looking for any small differences, and finding none. Remus would catch himself doing this, and he would shake off his own unease with an effort and make some new, pointless remark, or order another round of drinks, or make a show of gazing toward the inside of the pub, as though he was looking for Bagman (who, just as they had hoped, had snuck out the back way after some forty-five minutes, and had, if all had gone well, encountered a big black stray among the rubbish bins behind the bar). Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Remus would always find himself staring at the effigy again, and the whole process would repeat itself. And in this slow, uneasy way, three hours gradually passed.

After checking his watch a final time, Remus was just about to stand up and make his good-byes, and was feeling both relieved to be going yet also strangely reluctant to abandon his temporary companion. He was just draping his scarf around his neck and rising from his chair when the effigy heaved a great, gusty sigh and raised its eyes turned towards him mournfully.

"I'm bored, Moony," it said.

Remus abruptly sat back down in his chair, hard. "_What_?" he gasped.

"This is boring, just sitting here like this," the effigy said. "I don't like it. Aren't _you_ tired of it?"

"I – I – I was just thinking of leaving…" Remus mumbled inanely, and rubbed his hands over his eyes, before gazing at the effigy once more.

"I don't blame you. I expect I'll be leaving soon too. From what Sirius said back there in the alley, I think my time is almost up. Good thing, too, because I'm _sick_ of this awful pub. Did you notice how dirty these glasses are?"

"I – I – I'm not – I-"

The effigy laughed. "It's cute, when you stutter that way. I like that. But hadn't you better get going? It's been what – about three hours and fifteen minutes?"

Remus found himself peeking at his watch again before he knew what he was doing. Then he caught himself and stared at the effigy once more. "You …can talk," he said, shaking his head, a bit dazed. "And … you were listening, back in the alley? You heard what…Sirius… said? About you, I mean?"

"Sure I heard. Three hours and forty-five minutes, along with my complete purpose in life. I'm lucky, in a way – I imagine _Sirius_ doesn't know how exactly how long he'll live _or_ exactly why he was born. Not that I was born, precisely, but you understand the analogy."

"Why – why didn't you say anything sooner?" Remus asked. "You've just been sitting here like a …like a wax dummy all evening."

The effigy smiled. "You were talking. I like listening to you talk."

"You like listening to me _talk_?" Remus repeated stupidly, at a loss.

"Of course. You're funny and you're nice. And I love you, don't I?"

"_No_," Remus whispered in reply, unaccountably horrified. "No, you don't. You _can't_."

"Well, I admit it came as something of a surprise, when I first realized. There you were, blathering on and on about those two new rare editions you got such a bargain on at Flourish and Blotts last week, and then there _it_ was. I knew. But it's not so strange, really, Moony, is it? Sirius loves you, doesn't he? And he's me … in a way … or I'm him …sort of …or something like that, anyway."

"But you're _not_ him," Remus objected. "You're not. He said so himself."

The effigy chuckled again. "Oh, I expect it's probably more a case of yes and no - but you know how he is. He thinks he knows everything. Or …well, _we_ think we know everything, I suppose. We're awfully conceited, you know."

Now Remus rubbed his forehead, vigorously. He felt as if he'd just fallen down a rabbit hole.

"Of course, we really do have a few things to be conceited about," the effigy continued. "I think his new spell just worked a _lot_ better than he ever expected it would. I wish you wouldn't be upset, Moony."

"I'm not upset … I'm just … just …" Remus let his voice trail off.

"Just running late, for one thing," the effigy said, and reached across the table and tapped at the watch on Remus' wrist. "You really should go."

Remus could not remember a time in his life when his emotions had ever been in such an abysmally confused snarl. "But …" he said, and then stopped, trying to find the right words to express the inexpressible and gazing silently at the figure seated across the table from him. A problematical entity that had been raised by magic far more powerful than its originator had ever intended and was both a magical wonder and a magical mistake. An entity that, in word and deed and thought, _was_ Sirius, and yet was not.

A living, feeling being doomed by a miscalculation at birth to the life expectancy of a mayfly.

"But now I can't just leave you here," Remus continued at last, however reluctant he was to speak the truth, to face the truth he had only just discovered. "Surely you can understand that? I can't just leave you to face what's coming next alone. When you do … return to the pentacle you came from …you won't have to go alone. I'll go with you – be there at the end with you."

The effigy frowned deeply, and the expression reminded Remus so vividly of all the times that Sirius had strongly disagreed with him that it raised a lump in his throat.

"No!" it said. "No – I don't want you to do that. Please don't do that."

"But I want-"

"I don't care. I don't want you to see it. I don't want to _see_ you seeing it. I don't think _you_ really want to see it either. Do you really want to watch …Sirius … vanish into nothing before your eyes?"

"I …no, I don't. But I think I might owe you a little consider-"

"If I were the man and not just the copy, maybe you might be obligated. But I'm not _really_ Sirius; you know that, you just said that. It will be the living image of your worst fear, won't it? I think so, anyway. And it would all be for _nothing_, Moony, nothing at all. When I'm gone, _Sirius_ will still be here, and that's what will matter. _I'm_ only a sort of an echo - nothing but 'smoke and mirrors' – you heard what he said - and he was right. I don't want you breaking your own heart over something that isn't even real!"

Remus blinked. "But …but _you_ are real!"

"Not for long," the effigy replied coolly.

This too, this propensity for bluntly speaking the unadorned and occasionally brutal truth, was so much like the original Sirius that Remus once again felt his throat fill. There were times, only a few of them, when all arguments would slide off the hard surface of Sirius' will like water sluicing off granite. Sirius was a loving, kind-hearted, good-natured man, and there was a true warmth and gentleness in him. But, Remus knew well, there was also something cold and hard and immovable in him too.

And his magical copy must, by the inexorable logic of magic, necessarily be equally hard.

As above, so below …

"But you are real, nevertheless, you know," Remus said gently, though he knew he had already lost the argument. "You were from the first word you said to me."

"I wish now I hadn't," the effigy answered.

Remus wrapped his scarf a bit more snugly about his neck; it seemed there was a nip of frost in the night air. "Don't say that," he remarked mildly and slowly rose from the table. "_I'm_ glad you did. I won't argue with you – I can see you're every bit as stubborn as he is. I'll just say good night. But I'll also say this. You're apparently as kind as he can be as well. Kinder to others than you are to yourself."

The effigy smiled, and it was that rare, uncannily beautiful smile that Sirius bestowed only on Remus and no other. It both gladdened and pierced Remus' heart to see it on the effigy's face.

"And I'll tell you something else, since you're listening," Remus went on. "You may not think all that much of yourself – certainly I suspect that in some ways, Sirius doesn't. But never doubt that he is loved by many, and that he's warranted all the love he's had, many times over. Sirius is a good man, and so it follows that you must be too. I'm glad to have met you."

"Thank you, Moony," the effigy replied. "You're kind too. And it hasn't been at all bad a life, you know. Short maybe, but decent enough. After all, I've spent nearly all of it with you – a generous loan on Sirius' part, if you ask me. If you… if you should decide to tell Sirius that his spell went a little …off the tracks, tell him that I had no regrets, will you?"

The effigy rose from the table too and offered its hand to Remus. Remus took it, and held it firmly, a warm and all-too-familiar weight. "I'll think carefully about what to tell him," he said. "Never fear."

The effigy smiled. "I know you will. Good bye. I'd kiss you if wasn't so crowded around here."

Remus could not help smiling back, though his heart was aching a bit as well. "If it wasn't so crowded around here, I imagine I'd let you. Good bye. Good…good journey."

Remus had put his head down and walked away. And although he did not look back and never truly saw it, the visual image of the effigy staring after him until he was out of sight would haunt his mind's eye and reappear in symbolic form in his dreams intermittently for the rest of his life.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Remus went home to the cottage he shared with Sirius, and by the time he got there, Sirius, just as he'd said he might be, was indeed there ahead of him, vastly excited by what he'd discovered following Bagman as Padfoot.

"Augustus Rookwood!" he'd crowed. "He's the one, I'm sure of it. Ludo hit a few more pubs after we left, got himself good and pissed, and then dropped in to catch a spot of exotic dancing at Salome's Veil down at the end of Knockturn. And who should show up just as Bubbles the Great was halfway through her Dance of the Vanishing Mists but that fine, upstanding Ministry official … Mr. A. Rookwood!"

Remus tried to imagine a big black dog creeping inside an after-hours strip club without being seen by any of the bouncers and came up a bit short. But Padfoot was nothing if not ingenious, he knew.

"Quite an eye-opener, in any case…" Sirius was musing. "I must say, that Bubbles has the most enormous pair of-"

"This is suggestive information, Sirius, certainly," Remus interrupted. "But hardly conclusive. We'll have to wait and see how and if the planted information filters into the Ministry. Rookwood might have been there for any number of reasons. After all, he could have come just to enjoy Bubbles and her huge set of-"

"Oh, honestly, Remus," Sirius interrupted. "I've never taken old Gussie for a wizard who'd frequent sleazy strip joints in the worst part of Knockturn Alley, have you? Not at all his sort of thing – he must have been there for Bagman, not Bubbles, well-endowed witch though she is. You'll see that I'm right, in the next few weeks. How did it go with the … the effigy? No problems?"

Remus blinked at this question, and found himself doing some very fast mental back-pedaling. He was still unsure what, if anything, he intended to tell Sirius about the magical reflection he'd cast, and he still needed some time to think it all over. All he knew for a fact was that he never wanted Sirius to cast this particular spell again; but he really had no idea at all of how he would go about explaining his feelings to his friend.

"The … effigy … served its purpose perfectly," Remus finally answered, after some hesitation. At least he could be truthful on that score, up to a point. "I have no doubt that it looked absolutely convincing to anyone who might have been watching. It was … it was _extremely_ lifelike, you may be sure. But …but right now … I'm tired and I'd like to get some sleep. We can discuss everything in the morning, all right?"

Sirius looked at Remus sharply. He'd heard the slight strangeness in the tone of Remus' voice, of course. Remus sighed. It was damned near impossible to hide emotional upheaval from Sirius Black. He could _sense_ the subtle twistings of the heart as unerringly as Padfoot could sniff out a bone.

"Remus?" Sirius promptly asked. "Did anything go wrong? Was there some problem with the spell? Did you-?"

Right on schedule, Remus thought to himself, both resigned and annoyed, and sighed again. "Look, Sirius – I really am completely knackered. Everything worked fine, all right? We can go over all the details tomorrow. I'm going to bed."

Sirius, of course, was also perfectly capable of sensing when Remus had shut the iron door, and he'd temporarily abandoned all further questioning as a pointless waste of time and energy. So, they had gone to bed, just as Remus had insisted, and though Remus had imagined that he'd find sleep elusive that night, in the end, he turned out to have been mistaken. Fatigue and the evening's excitement and all his uneasy indecision about what to say to Sirius had worn Remus out more than he'd known, and he'd fallen deeply asleep not long after his head hit the pillow.

But only an hour or two later, he'd awakened suddenly in the dark, and had sat bolt upright in the bed he shared with Sirius.

He could see nothing, and he heard nothing other than the soft, even breathing of Sirius in bed beside him. But _something_ had awakened him abruptly – he just couldn't say exactly _what_. He fumbled about on his bedside table for his wand, feeling for it in the dark.

Sirius beside him stirred, aroused by Remus' movements, and then spoke, voice thickened with sleep. "Mmmm? Moony? Something – something wrong?"

Just as Sirius was shaking off the last shreds of grogginess and sitting up in bed himself, Remus' hand closed on his wand. He took it up and muttered "_Lumos_."

The sudden dim glow revealed Sirius' effigy, standing silently at the foot of their bed like a specter and gazing at both of them intently.

Sirius uttered a short, sharp cry and Remus dropped his wand on the bedclothes between his knees. The effigy's face was painted with changing shadows as the light at the end of Remus' wand was muffled in the blankets.

"What the _fuck_?" Sirius gasped, hand pressed against his chest.

"You!" the effigy barked, glaring at Sirius. "You idiot! You fucked up the Arithmancy calculations! I'm still here!"

Sirius gazed, slack-jawed, at his magical copy for a long moment. Then he turned slowly to Remus.

"Was there … anything …about tonight … that you forgot to tell me, Moony?" he asked.

Remus managed to get his own wild breathing under control enough to sigh a bit. He might have known that in the end, _he'd_ be the one to get blamed for the whole bizarre fiasco.

"I went to the pentacle, just like I was supposed to," the effigy was saying. "My purpose was fulfilled, my time was closing, everything according to plan, no hitches. I stood there and I waited. And waited. _And_ waited. Nothing happened. You got my duration interval wrong, Sirius."

Sirius was getting out of bed, shaking his head. "Not the _only_ thing I got wrong, apparently," he muttered, with a small accusing glance at Remus.

"I was _going_ to tell you, Sirius, really I was," Remus said. "I just didn't know … exactly … how to put it. I needed to sleep on it."

"Hmmph," was Sirius' only reply. He began to rummage in the large chest where he kept all his notes, implements and magical supplies. Remus retrieved his wand and lit the lamps at either side of the bed.

The effigy drifted over to where Sirius was furiously pulling stacks of untidy papers and so forth out of the chest and looked over his shoulder.

"It's not _his_ fault, you know," it said to its creator. "Are these your notes? Is this where I came from? What a mess! Honestly, how can you find _anything_ in here?"

"I know where everything is…" Sirius answered absently, still shuffling through stacks of scribbled notes and calculations. The effigy touched his arm to get his attention. He jumped a bit, and then forced himself to look it in the eye. Remus was struck by a sudden realization of how terribly _strange_ it must seem to Sirius to do that.

"_What_?" he snapped at his magical copy.

"Sirius. Sirius, please…" it answered, after a pause, in a small voice. "Please tell me what I'm supposed to do now?

Sirius stared at himself for a moment, and then slowly put his own hand on his copy's shoulder and squeezed a bit. "I … we… the first thing we're going to do is see … where we went wrong on the formulae, all right? We …we'll need to recalculate your interval."

"Oh. Oh, that's good, then. Yes, that makes sense," the effigy said.

"Ah, all right, here we are," Sirius muttered, gathering a motley assortment of notes into a single bundle. "These are my calculations, and here are some of the development notes, lists of ingredients, some of the original incantations … Remus, come here, would you? I want you to rerun my formulae, recheck them, see if you get the same results as I did … and … and you …" he said, glancing again at his effigy. "When did you first notice that you'd become …aware? Do you remember?"

Remus rose from the bed and took the stack of Sirius' papers over to the bureau and pulled a quill out of one of the top drawers while Sirius guided the effigy over toward the bed.

"Sit down for a moment," he said to it. "_Think_. What do you remember?"

It sat down slowly and then looked up at him. "I don't know. There wasn't a specific moment, exactly. It was just … I just felt more and more … alive. Moony was talking to me, and I was listening to him, and I … I remembered how much I loved him … and …"

Sirius was staring into his reflection's eyes. "You _remembered_ that you … loved him?"

"Well … yes and no, in a way. I did remember, yes, but I was also thinking it was ridiculous, you know? Because how could I ever have forgotten it in the first place? I've _always_ loved him."

Sirius sort of sagged into a sitting position beside the effigy. "But you can't have, you know. You can't always have loved him, because four or five hours ago, you didn't exist at all. You … you have no history."

The effigy looked intently at Sirius. "I have _yours_, I suppose."

Sirius buried his face in his hands and groaned. "Godric's Blood. This is, without a doubt, the most bollocksed-up _botch_ of things I've ever made!" He uncovered his face and looked at the effigy again.

"I am _so_ sorry," he said. "You must know I'd _never_ have wished any of this on you deliberately. I'm sorry for what I've done to you."

Oddly enough, the effigy smiled. "I think … we … may be a bit too eager to take all the blame and snap up all the guilt, if you don't mind my saying. It's not entirely realistic. You thought I'd just be an empty-headed straw man, I do understand that. Nothing in my head, nothing in my heart, not much more than surface to me at all. But you know, I actually don't _mind_ being a little more than that, when all is said and done. Even if it is only for a little while."

Remus had just finished double-checking Sirius' notes and brought them back over toward the bed where Sirius was sitting side by side with his effigy. He was struck, for a moment, by the sight of them side by side like that, legs loosely crossed in precisely the same way, dark heads tilted at the exact same angle. He felt a minute tightening in the muscles of his lower belly, a faint and passing heat in his skin. His steps slowed momentarily, and then he shook it off.

"All right," he said to both of them. "I can't find anything wrong with the calculations, per se. But I do have an idea. Sirius, did you factor in the Law of Three-Times-Three when you were running these formulae?"

Sirius blinked. "No, of course not. It's essentially a transfiguration spell. Three-Times-Three doesn't apply – I didn't cast the spell _on_ anyone, I just transfigured a preexisting object. A reflection from a mirror."

"Is that right?" the effigy said, interested and a bit impressed. "That's really very clever, I must say. Magically defining a reflection as an object. I think I'd have guessed contagion and sympathy rather than transfiguration as the essential principles, if I'd had to hazard a guess."

"Well, there were some small elements of contagion too," Sirius assured his mirror image. "A touch of sympathetic magic as well. I did use some of my hair, sweat, and a drop or two of blood. But the real heart of the pentacle was the mirror and the reflection in it, because-"

"Because you had to have the image as the baseline, right? But you also had to separate the image from the mirror, yes? And to keep the magical framework fluid, you must have-"

"I used mercury, that's right. But I had to balance it out with-"

Remus snorted, trying not to laugh. They both looked up at him, slightly startled. The two of them, it appeared, would very likely have been content to talk shop all night long, if he didn't interrupt them. He felt an unaccountable sense of bemused delight.

"If the two of you will forgive me for interrupting your little chat, I was still wondering about the duration interval and Three-Times-Three. Sirius, it's true that the Law only applies if you're casting a spell on a sentient being, so it was logical not to allow for it, originally. But your …your copy, here – he _is_ a sentient being. Or he _was_, as soon as you brought him into existence. So …"

"What are you saying?" Sirius asked. "Are you saying that-?"

"I'm saying that I think you got the duration interval right _until_ he materialized in the pentacle. But as soon as that happened, and he _was_ sentient, the Law was invoked retroactively. I think the interval increased by a factor of three the moment he appeared."

Sirius and his copy looked at one another for a moment.

"That could…" Sirius began.

"Make sense," the effigy finished.

"So, then, the _correct_ interval would be-" Sirius said.

"Eleven hours and fifteen minutes," Remus said, and moved around the bed to his bedside table, where he picked up his watch. "Of which, about five hours have already elapsed. It's almost midnight now, so ..."

"Ah. All right, then," the effigy said, sounding a bit relieved. "So, I'm done about … a quarter after six this morning."

Sirius stared at the effigy, hard. "And that … that doesn't bother you?"

"Of course not. Why would it? At least _I_ know where I'm going and exactly when I'll get there. But you and Remus – _real_ people – you don't. Frankly, I don't know how you can stand it, not knowing. All that uncertainty would drive me round the twist."

Remus sank down into his side of the bed while he thought about this. Profound philosophical questions coming on top of profoundly _weird_ magical mishaps seemed a bit much to him, at that moment. Sirius, slightly amused, grinned at the effigy.

"Oh, well," Sirius said. "Part of the price one pays for being human – not really knowing anything about anything important. In a way, the uncertainty can be … what makes it interesting. It's just something we all get used to."

"With varying degrees of success," Remus added. "Mortality has always presented something of a problem to the thinking being."

Sirius chuckled. "Moony here has the makings of a first-class cynic somewhere in him," he remarked to the effigy. "That's why he needs a scatterbrain like me on his team. To cheer him up."

"I know he does," the effigy said, also chuckling.

Remus did not know whether to be charmed or irritated by this apparent like-mindedness between Sirius and his magical copy. On the one hand, it was amazing and entrancing and an utterly, utterly unique experience. On the other hand, he just wasn't sure how much he liked the idea of the two of them ganging up on him.

They were both looking at him, identical fond smiles on their handsome faces.

Remus felt another small stirring in his lower belly and this time, he correctly identified it as an owl-post from his libido. His scholar's mind immediately supplied a literal translation:

_Potential once-in-a-lifetime erotic encounter! Golden opportunity! Seize the day! _

He did his level best to squash these stirrings before they could take hold and cause him to do something untoward. His libido might not have _any_ standards of decency or conscience, but his higher intellect certainly did. He opened his mouth and heard himself talking to the effigy.

"So, now that we know how long you have, the question is – what are we going to do with you for the next six hours? We'll have to think of some way to pass the time…"

Remus heard the slightly husky tone in his own voice, and could have strangled himself on the spot for making such a suggestive remark.

Both Sirius and his effigy had also clearly heard that husky tone as well, since they both immediately came to full attention in all the subtle ways that Remus, over many years of being Sirius' lover, had learned well. Their bodies shifted slightly on the edge of the bed, turning to face him more fully. Sirius tossed his head lightly, shaking his hair back out of his face. The effigy's posture changed by a fraction, spine curving fluidly and head tilting just a bit to the side. The effigy's nostrils flared a tiny touch and Sirius' lips parted minutely. They both gazed at him intently, both sets of pupils dilating.

And then they both smiled at him, both spontaneously displaying that uncannily beautiful smile that was for Remus alone. An expression that had always melted Remus' heart on sight and that he had _never_ had one iota of resistance to. This time, magically doubled before his eyes.

Another message from his libido followed; this time, a Howler:

_OH! OH YES! GIMME THAT! AT ONCE!_

"Hmmm…" Sirius purred. "Moony, did you have some specific pass-time in mind?"

"Mmmm…" the effigy also purred, and glanced at Sirius. "He looks like he knows some wonderful secret, doesn't he?"

"Maybe he does," Sirius said. "He's certainly blushing enough."

"I'm _not_ blushing," Remus asserted forcefully and completely untruthfully.

Sirius turned to the effigy. "You know, I think the real question is – what would _you_ like to spend the rest of your life doing? Any ideas?"

To Remus' great surprise, the effigy blushed. Sirius seldom blushed; he was so rarely embarrassed by anything. Remus discovered that he found it delightful, seeing that slightest rosy cast on Sirius' cheeks, even if they weren't _really_ Sirius' cheeks. His belly tightened by another notch and he felt a heat rising in his nether regions.

"Well, I …" the effigy said, and paused to swallow. "Moony did sort of … promise me a kiss at the pub, earlier tonight…"

"_Did_ he, now?" Sirius asked, with a certain comical severity.

"I think he was just being polite, though," the effigy quickly added.

Sirius laughed outright. "He _is_ very well-mannered. Everyone says so."

Remus had had just about enough. "You supercilious wankers can just stop making fun of me right this minute! It's hardly fair, you know, both of you! And stop talking about me as though I wasn't even in the room!

"_You_…" he then said to the effigy. "_Come here_."

The effigy grinned, delighted, but then paused and turned to Sirius. "Is it …is it all right? You don't mind, do you?"

Sirius' face curved into a slow sensuous smile and he settled back a bit against his pillows. "Go ahead. I can deny him nothing, after all."

"You know, I have a strong suspicion that I won't be able to either," the effigy said. He leaned in toward Remus, stretching himself across Sirius' legs. "So … Moony, old thing. Moony. May I kiss you?"

Remus looked into the effigy's beautiful face, taking in the full, expressive mouth, the milky skin, the glossy black hair and the bright eyes. Then he glanced at Sirius, taking in all the same familiar features once again. A previously undiscovered door opened in his mind and heart.

"Yes," he said to the effigy. "Yes, you can kiss me. In time. But kiss _him_ first, though."

He waved his hand at Sirius, who, to Remus' distinct pleasure, immediately also blushed, thus completing the resemblance to his effigy to the last, intimate detail.

"Oh. Oh, wow," Sirius said, very quietly. "I … I don't know…"

The effigy was staring at his maker. "That … that would be …"

"… _incredibly_ strange," Sirius finished.

Remus smiled. "Just think of it as-"

"The most unbelievably complicated example of masturbation ever devised?" Sirius asked sharply.

"If you like…" Remus said, now grinning. "Go ahead. Do it. Unless, of course, you're chicken…"

Both Sirius and his copy looked mortally offended by this comment.

"Both of you," Remus added.

"Hmmph," Sirius snorted, and put his hands on his mirror image's shoulders and pulled him closer.

"Right, then," the effigy snapped, and curled himself into Sirius' lap and put his arms around his neck.

Their heads tilted toward one another and a sheaf of Sirius' hair fell forward into the effigy's face. He brushed it away slowly, and their lips met. Met and held, and then met more deeply. It was the most insanely erotic sight Remus had ever seen in his life. The burgeoning erection between his legs promptly firmed right up and began to throb.

The magically enhanced kiss went on, and deepened still more, and Sirius put his hands into his copy's hair and the effigy dropped his hands to Sirius' waist and pressed himself more fully against his creator. Remus' mouth slid open as he watched them and his breath became ragged. The two of them finally broke apart with an identical weak groan.

"Voyeurism…" Sirius gasped.

"Exhibitionism…" the effigy gasped.

"God Almighty," Remus gasped. "Do it again."

Sirius and the effigy both burst out laughing.

"He doesn't _look_ at all kinky," the effigy remarked.

"I know," Sirius said. "He looks like a tweedy, bookish, stodgy stuffed-shirt of a professor. It takes everybody in."

"But we can deny him nothing," the effigy added, and put his hand to the fastenings at the collar of Sirius' robes and stroked the partially exposed skin of his throat. "May I … would it be all right if I …"

Sirius slow smile became _unimaginably_ sensuous as he arched his neck into the effigy's caress. "Ask Moony. He seems to be the one calling the shots here."

The effigy duplicated Sirius' sensual smile precisely and kissed Sirius' throat while gazing directly into Remus' eyes.

"I was wondering if you'd like to see a little more skin, Moony?" the effigy asked.

"I find that _I_ wouldn't mind too much," Sirius put in, also staring into Remus' eyes while slowly running his hand down the effigy's backbone. "In case you were concerned…"

"I … I'd like to see a _lot_ more skin," Remus answered, breathlessly. "Now. Please."

Sirius chuckled; it sounded almost like a purr. "We have our orders," he said to the effigy.

Sirius only had light silken bed-robes on, loose and comfortable and easy to open. The effigy, of course, was still dressed in a perfect copy of Sirius' street robes, from earlier in the evening. The two of them seemed to have hit on some unspoken mutual agreement, because they concentrated on unwrapping the effigy's more complex costume first. Sirius pushed the cloak off the effigy's shoulders and let it fall to the floor while the effigy undid all the fastenings at his own throat and at his breast and shrugged the loosened fabric off of himself. It pooled around his waist and Sirius laid his hand on the effigy's now bare chest.

"Would you stand up for a moment, please? Don't trip on all these clothes, though."

"Moony?" the effigy asked. "Do you want me to stand up?"

Remus nodded silently, absolutely rapt.

The effigy rose to his feet and the bunched robes at his waist slipped down his hips and legs to the floor. Sirius reached out and curled his hands around the effigy's almost bare hips, gathering the waistband of his copy's pants into his hands. He glanced over his shoulder at Remus.

"Shall I? Last chance to change your mind, you perverse thing."

"Change my _mind_?" Remus answered him. "Are you _mad_?"

Sirius laughed and slid the pants away, maddeningly slowly. The effigy bent forward and braced his hand on Sirius' shoulder while he stepped out of them. Then he rose again and stood to his full height, completely nude, pale flesh gleaming in the dim light of the bedroom, smooth chest rising and falling rapidly, body visibly aroused.

"Good God," Remus whispered. "_God_. Now do you see, Sirius? Do you see why I say you're beautiful, even when I know you don't like it? Even you have to admit …" He broke off and waved his hand at the effigy helplessly.

Sirius looked at his copy critically for a moment. "We-ell … objectively speaking … maybe you might have a point … but I have to tell you, from the neck up, he looks a whole hell of a lot like my mother."

"Or like his horrid cousin," the effigy added. "I seem to have some vaguely unpleasant memories about her, for some reason."

"Let's not discuss my family just now, if you don't mind," Sirius snapped. "All us inbred, pureblood genetic dead-ends look much too much alike, it's a grotesque fact of life. Remus, you're the director of this bizarre little psychodrama. What's next?"

Remus rolled his eyes. "He always gets snippy if I mention his appearance," he said to the effigy. "Maybe you can think of something to do to put him back in a pleasant temper?"

The effigy settled himself on the bed beside Sirius and kissed his cheek in a friendly sort of way.

"He'd just prefer to look like himself and not a dozen generations of other Blacks," he said, and kissed Sirius again. "Wouldn't you?"

"Can you blame me?" Sirius replied and leaned into the kiss a tiny touch.

"Oh, no worries, mate. _I_ understand perfectly. Could you raise your arms? We'll pull this robe off."

Sirius smiled, apparently over his momentary fit of pique. "No, just open it. Moony likes me all undone, but partially clothed. It drives him a bit mental. You'll see."

"Oh, yes?" the effigy said, interested. He pulled the fabric away from Sirius left side, baring one shoulder and most of Sirius' chest. "Like this?"

"Yesssss," Remus commented. "Like that."

"Let's see how much interest in this 'bizarre little psychodrama' you _really_ have," the effigy said into Sirius ear, and then licked it. "Shall we? Empirical evidence, don't you know. Roll to the right, a bit."

Sirius twisted to his right side and his magical copy pulled his robe more fully open and then kissed his hip once he'd gotten it cleared.

"Mmmm," Sirius mumbled in response. "Nice. That's … really nice. I like that. So, anyway, will you need a ruler and calipers to make your evaluation, or can you just … eyeball it?"

They both snickered like naughty little boys at the exact same time and the effigy rubbed Sirius' bare belly in a circular motion, as though he was rubbing a magic lamp with a genie inside. Remus simply moaned outright.

Then Remus noticed something special and leaned forward toward them a bit.

"Oh. Oh, look, he has it too. Oh … _my_ … umm …"

"_Who_ has it?" the effigy asked, confused.

"Has _what_?" Sirius asked, equally confused.

"Your birthmark," Remus explained to Sirius, suddenly unable to stop grinning like a maniac. "That little key-shaped _spot_ you have. He's got one too."

Both Sirius and the effigy looked down at themselves, and then down at one another.

"Oh, oh I see," the effigy said. "I hadn't noticed that before. What a peculiar place for a birthmark."

Sirius reached out and lightly touched the corresponding spot on his magical duplicate, a slightly intrigued look on his face. "How odd. I've never really seen it before…" he said. "It's at a bad angle for me. Remus always makes such a _fuss_ over it, though …"

"Only because it's just about my favorite thing in the world," Remus explained, still grinning madly.

"Is it really?" the effigy asked him, somewhat bemused. He put his own forefinger on Sirius' spot. "This little thing?"

"Yours is a just a little bit to the left," Sirius remarked to the effigy. He glanced at Remus. "Is that where it is on me?"

Remus grinned so much he was surprised the top of his head didn't fall off. "No, no it isn't, Sirius. Yours is a little to the right."

"Oh, Merlin's Whiskers!" said Sirius, and burst out laughing. "This is all just so … so incredibly _odd_. I'm all at sixes and sevens, truly I am!" He continued to laugh, hard, and in short order, the effigy also started laughing.

"C'mere, handsome," Sirius finally cackled to his effigy. "Might as well give us another kiss. I suppose Moony'll never forgive me if you don't."

"No," Remus confirmed. "I guarantee you I won't."

"All right, all right," the effigy spluttered, through his own guffaws. "I'll do it, Moony. But first he has to promise not to call me 'handsome' ever again!"

And then, of course, both Sirius and the effigy simply dissolved into crazed cackles like the rather eccentric creatures they both, via a slightly miscalculated spell, were.

Sirius made a great effort to stop laughing enough to talk. "Sorry," he gasped to the effigy. "How about 'glamour-puss'?"

"How about I tickle you _dead_?" the effigy replied. "Don't think I can't do it. I was born knowing all your ticklish places. Every last one of them."

"That information could work both ways, you know," Sirius growled through all his laughter and tackled the effigy in one fell swoop, long fingers instinctively seeking and finding all the most ticklish spots as he bore his copy to the mattress beneath him. The effigy struggled wildly against the playful assault and tickled back and laughed so hard he choked. Their roughhousing almost bounced Remus right off the bed.

An odd thought occurred to Remus as he scrambled to maintain his place. He suddenly realized that Sirius had never and would never play so rough with him. He had never before seen such a clear demonstration of how _much_ of that wild, manic spirit that imbued Sirius he customarily kept damped down. And then, Remus realized how good it made _him_ feel to see Sirius with the one partner in the world with whom he could truly take the gloves off.

"Give up …yet … _handsome_?" Sirius was huffing to his temporary opponent.

"Fuck … you … and the … the bike you flew in on …" the effigy replied, still laughing his brains out.

Sirius tickled harder and mock-bit the enemy's left flank, still laughing himself. "Surrender!" he demanded.

"You surrender!" The effigy heaved himself up and dumped Sirius onto his own back and then immediately pounced on him, trying to pin him in a wild tangle of flailing limbs.

A doomed attempt from the outset, Remus could see. They were, of course, much too evenly matched for one or the other to prevail. In the melee of white skin and flying black hair and wild peals of laughter, Remus would not have been able to guess which of them was which, were it not for the effigy's state of total undress, compared to Sirius' skewed and tangled robes.

Another insanely erotic sight, really. Remus waited patiently for the two of them to tire one another out.

In time, their struggles slowed and finally subsided, and they both lay panting and still laughing occasionally, across the bed, long legs still comfortably tangled.

"I think we'll have to call it a draw…" Sirius admitted.

The effigy shrugged. "I have no objection. Could you move your elbow? You've got it in my ear."

Sirius raised himself up enough to rest his shoulders against the headboard and propped his head in one hand. The effigy twisted himself around and rested his head lightly on Sirius' stomach. Then they both languidly turned in the same moment to gaze at Remus.

"Oh, dear," Sirius said. "We've gotten distracted and neglected you, Moony. How very rude of us."

He reached out his free hand and stroked Remus' cheek. The effigy put his hand on Remus' knee.

"Well, we _are_ terribly rude sometimes," the effigy said. "That is, I'm all right, mostly, but Sirius here is an unmitigated boor. How you tolerate him is a mystery to me."

Sirius smiled lazily, amused by the insult, and reached down to clamp his hand over the effigy's mouth to shut it.

"How _do_ you tolerate me, Moony?" he asked, softly.

Remus smiled. "Well, it _is_ a bit difficult, to be quite honest, but you do have your strong points. And, of course, it doesn't hurt that you're the sexiest wizard alive."

The effigy laughed so hard at that reply that he shook Sirius' restraining hand off. "Oh … honestly! Of all the absurd nonsense…"

"What are _you_ laughing at?" Sirius asked him, also laughing. "That makes you the sexiest wizard alive too, moron."

"Only for a couple of hours or so," the effigy reminded him lightly. Most of the laughter went out of Sirius' face at once and he stared down at the effigy in his lap.

"Is that starting to … to make you unhappy?" Sirius asked.

"No … no, not really. I was … just thinking how much I've enjoyed being here, like this, with the two of you. That I'll be sorry to leave when the time comes. You've both been so kind to me."

Sirius sighed and drew his hands across the effigy's temples, massaging gently with his fingertips. Remus recognized the movement; it was something that Sirius had always particularly liked when Remus did it for him. Remus wondered if Sirius knew what he was doing, or if it was purely unconscious.

"_Remus_ has been kind to you," Sirius amended. "But me - I'm the one who put you in a severely limited existence and then accidentally made you aware enough to know it. I am clearly not qualified to be God. You shouldn't thank me for anything."

The effigy reached up to Sirius' neck and pulled his head down, down close enough to kiss him.

"You're too quick to take the dim view," the effigy said, once he'd finished kissing Sirius and released him. "I told you – I don't _mind_ being aware and … alive. Especially considering the alternative – just being a brainless, emotionless … illusion. It's been a _good_ life, Sirius. From my perspective, it really doesn't much matter that you did it by mistake."

"Or that it's coming to an abrupt end?" Sirius asked.

"Isn't _your_ life coming to an abrupt end?" the effigy countered. "And Moony's? And everyone else's'? When your time comes, will _you_ be saying 'I wish I'd never lived at all'?"

"I hope not…" Sirius said quietly, more to himself than to the two of them.

Remus felt strangely troubled by the turn the conversation had taken and commented a bit more harshly than he'd intended. "It's not the same thing! _Sirius'_ life isn't coming to an end at six this morning!"

Sirius looked up into Remus' eyes quickly, and then his face softened. "You can't _know_ that, though, Moony," he said gently. "None of us knows the day or the hour."

"I do," the effigy reminded them softly.

Both Remus and Sirius stared at him, and he smiled at them. "See? I keep _telling_ you silly gits that it's a good life. But … you know, I don't think I really can be the sexiest wizard alive. After all, Moony won't even kiss me."

Remus laughed. Perhaps the effigy, an ephemeral magical construction made only of smoke and mirrors, had somehow guessed more about the nature of existence than either he or Sirius ever would. The future would unfold as it unfolded. What truly mattered was the moment.

_Seize the day…_

"I never said I _wouldn't_," Remus argued, smiling. "Only that there were a few things I wanted to see first."

Sirius heaved a great mock-sigh. "So now we're back to his previously unknown voyeuristic kinks. Work, work, work!"

"But we can deny him nothing," the effigy added in long-suffering tones. He turned his head in Sirius' lap and, while gazing at Remus, deliberately licked Sirius' key-shaped spot.

"…holy … _fuck_…" Sirius gasped, galvanized by the intimate touch. His hips arched upward and he blindly reached out and grasped one of the effigy's slim hands, then brought it to his lips to kiss the fingertips.

"Is that the way, Moony?" the effigy asked, lightly stroking Sirius' hip with his free hand as he gazed up at Remus.

Remus could only stare, fascinated to silence by the bizarre sight before him, a wash of subtle contrasts and colors: the effigy's pale fingertips with the pink tip of Sirius' tongue among them; the stark chiaroscuro of the effigy's black hair flowing over the white skin of Sirius' thighs; the dusky scarlet of the effigy's lips so near the deepening rose of the living blood they had summoned to Sirius' quickening cock, the cool, familiar grey of the effigy's eyes and the warm, dark sable of the birthmark.

"Oh, yes," Remus said at last. "_Yes_. That's the way."

The effigy took Sirius into both his hands, beautifully shaped hands that were achingly familiar to Remus. He looked up into his creator's eyes and then kissed the birthmark again, almost as though he was saying hello.

"Would it be all right, then? More, I mean ..?" he said quietly to Sirius. "Do you want … would you like … how should I ..?"

Sirius' eyes slid closed and his head slumped back against the headboard. His own hands slid gently over the effigy's head and the sides of his face. "Only what you want - only if it's what you want…"

"I want to please you … I …I'd like that … but I'm not sure how to…"

"I think you'll just _know_…" Sirius whispered, voice faint.

Self-gratification, magically squared. As it turned out, Sirius was right. The effigy _did_ know.

Remus had never seen a more perfectly synchronized sexual act. The effigy knew all that Sirius wanted before he could ask, even before he knew himself. Every movement, every desire, every slightest hitch of breath or twitch of muscle, anticipated and realized before the mental conception could even begin to take form. Even Remus, Sirius' intimate since they had both been little more than children, was able to learn much from the unique demonstration. And in all the years that followed, Remus would never forget this bizarre and amazing and ultimately haunting vision, his beautiful, beloved Sirius - dancing with himself on the edge of doom.

At the end of it, when Sirius was trembling with pleasure and gasping for breath and laughing as he always did in his furthest extremity of physical joy, Remus suddenly moved over close to both of them and pulled the effigy to himself, smoothing the sheaves of inky hair out of his face and holding him close.

"Oh, Moony," the effigy said, staring up at his alter-ego's transported face. "Is it always like this? Do I … does he… do we always laugh that way?"

"Every single time," Remus assured him.

"No wonder you love him," the effigy said, now gazing directly into Remus' eyes.

"No wonder I love you _both_," Remus corrected, and kissed the effigy deeply. He could still taste the essence of Sirius in the effigy's warm, soft mouth. "How could I not?"

"Ah," the effigy breathed, that familiar, weirdly beautiful smile on his much-loved face. "A promise fulfilled. Thank you, Moony."

Sirius stirred then and wriggled down a bit to curl himself more fully into both of them, Remus and the effigy. He lazily kissed his magical copy's cheekbone and then stroked Remus' hair. "He always keeps his promises," he said to the effigy. "I've never known him not to."

It was Remus' pleasure, then, to kiss them both in turn, first Sirius and then the effigy, then Sirius and then the effigy once again, over and over until he had lost track of whose mouth he was sounding or of whose breath he shared. It was the oddest, most dizzying sensation for Remus, overwhelmingly pleasurable and yet, at the same time, indefinably bittersweet.

There was something so fragile about it, and Remus was caught in a vivid sense of having somehow captured a momentary glimpse through a temporary and purely accidental loophole in the normal fabric of space, or of having pulled a single perfect moment out of the general wrack of time.

And he was aware of a great desire to make the effigy's last hours in the world as full and as rich and as _complete_ as he could.

After all, wasn't that really all that he wanted for Sirius too?

Remus looked away from the effigy and Sirius met his eyes. What he saw there assured him that Sirius too wanted what he wanted. They had been partners for far too long for Remus to ever mistake the message of agreement in Sirius' gaze. Sirius would do all he could to help Remus ensure that the effigy would never have cause to regret being made alive, for as long as he _was_ alive.

While Remus bent to kiss the effigy's throat and chest, Sirius raised himself to his knees and pulled the effigy against him, until his backside was resting on Sirius' bent knees, his back against Sirius' midsection, his head rolling into the hollow of Sirius shoulder. Sirius dipped his own head down to kiss the effigy's ears, to whisper in them, to massage his temples again, to run his hands lightly over the effigy's shoulders and down his sides.

"Now let us please _you_," Sirius murmured to his magical duplicate.

Remus was struck anew by the sight of Sirius' face just behind his mirror image's face, his lips against the effigy's ear, the sheaves of their hair commingling. Sirius raised his eyes to Remus' again as he tugged gently at the effigy's earlobe with his teeth and the effigy moaned softly and rolled his head once more, eyes closed.

Remus took the nonverbal cue. He put his hands on the effigy's knees and slowly pulled his legs apart, then raised himself up slightly and knelt between them. He opened his own pajama shirt, hands trembling on the buttons, and then slid the bottoms down off his hips.

"Look," Sirius was saying into the effigy's ear. "Look at him. See how beautiful he is, our Moony? How superb? How _singular_?"

The effigy had opened his eyes and was taking in the unclothed Remus, head to toe, pillar to post, scars and all. He reached out a hand toward Remus, long fingers outstretched to touch him, then hesitated.

"Your scars," he whispered, a bit awestruck. "All your _scars_. Do they hurt?"

Remus took the effigy's outstretched hand and laid it on his own belly, on the long hooked scar that zigzagged down into his abdomen. "Not always," he answered, and smiled.

Sirius kissed behind the effigy's ears and swept his hair aside to blow on the back of his neck while Remus kissed the palms of his hands and let him familiarize himself, through touch, with the visible history of lycanthropy etched on Remus' skin. While the effigy, by magical proxy, had Sirius' memories, not the simple touch of a hand and nor the poignant warmth of living flesh could ever be truly recreated in memory alone. The present reality of these things, these sensations, was entirely new to the effigy, a magical entity only a few hours old. He accepted and marveled at and treasured the marks on Remus' flesh in exactly the same way Sirius once had, the first time Remus had permitted _him_ to touch however and wherever he wished.

Sirius slipped both his hands under the effigy's arms to slide his palms over the effigy's chest and belly, down past his navel and up again to his pectoral muscles, fingertips just barely skimming the nipples in the light, almost not-there way that Remus knew from experience Sirius himself most preferred.

Remus was _shaken_ with delight, watching Sirius, in effect, touching himself, pleasing himself, _loving_ himself. Remus hoped that somehow, through that extra degree of magical separation, Sirius had begun to understand all the _good_ that Remus saw in him, even if only in fleeting hints. Remus was very aware of the realization that he would never see or _feel_ anything quite like this again.

Sirius slid his hands down his magical copy's belly and then gently took himself in hand, stroking and softly kneading the effigy's trembling cock in his hands. The effigy moaned and writhed in response and his eyes went heavy-lidded and unfocussed, showing that same complete sensual abandon that Remus had so often rejoiced in with the real Sirius. The sight of Sirius' elegant hands between the effigy's trembling thighs ignited a blaze of hunger in Remus' own heart, and he surged forward to lie between the effigy's outstretched legs, pressing his own hips against the effigy's, pressing Sirius' still-working hands inside the small, warm interstice between their bodies. He could feel the pulses of the effigy's heartbeat and Sirius' against his own skin, in Sirius' wrists, in the effigy's throbbing member, in the answering pulse deep down inside his own belly. A compelling rhythm and pace that was, in all three cases, perfectly matched.

"He can be closer to you still…" Sirius was murmuring into the effigy's ears. "There can still be _more_. Moony, cast the charm, yes?"

Remus nodded jerkily and fumbled about in the bedclothes until he found his previously discarded wand while the effigy continued to utter soft, pleased cries at Sirius' uniquely knowledgeable ministrations. Remus could barely summon the stillness of mind he needed to cast the simple household spell that Sirius had adapted for this intimate purpose when they had first become lovers, and that they had continued to use for all the years since. Practice and repetition had refined their application of the charm over the years, and though Sirius had overdone it the first time and had rendered both of them as slippery as glass, Remus now cast the charm perfectly, and felt the familiar warm, mild tingling along the surface of his skin. The effigy's skin and Sirius' hands took on an easy silk-like slide against the flesh of Remus' belly.

Remus parted the effigy's legs still further and slid his own hands along the insides of his thighs, stopping for a moment to lay his hands atop Sirius' and pressing lightly, and then sliding them under the effigy's buttocks, fingers splayed out.

"Raise your hips a bit," Sirius was whispering to the effigy, taking the intended words right out of Remus' mouth. "Do you want to? Raise your hips for him."

The effigy opened his eyes and looked up at both of them for a moment, seeking out their eyes with an expression of mild wonder for both. "Like this?" he asked, raising his hips to a new, more convenient angle.

"Just like that," Remus answered softly and kissed him while he settled himself more comfortably between the effigy's long legs. He angled his own hips upward and began to slowly press himself forward, gently nudging for entrance.

"Closer still…" Sirius was whispering, working the effigy's cock with his hands and licking and nipping at his ears. "Always closer – _I_ always want him closer. And he _can_ be closer; he can be _inside_ you … inside and outside and all around you if you want him to."

"Ohhh …" the effigy gasped, shaking with pleasure and thrusting forward into Sirius' hands. "_Yes_. I want … I want …"

The effigy's voice trailed off into incoherent moans and he could not go on, but it didn't matter, because Remus knew what he wanted anyway. He pushed forward himself and fell into that familiar and well-loved sweetness that was absolute access to Sirius' body, to every part of it, inside and out. That _was_ Sirius' body, and yet, in this one peculiar instance, was not.

"_Yesssss_," Sirius was breathing, still talking, still murmuring into his magical mirror-image's ear. "Like that. Like that. He feels _so_ good, doesn't he? So _good_ …"

"…_so_ _good_ …" the effigy echoed, trembling.

_So good_, Remus scrambled mind echoed them both, and he _rocked_ forward, forward and back, forward and back. And both Sirius and his effigy rose to meet him naturally, completing the circuit he'd established.

The three of them found their rhythm easily, a rhythm and a perfect three-part cycle of movement that was both old and well-worn and wonderfully familiar, and yet was also entirely new. It seemed too strong and effortless and strangely fitting a pattern to ever cease or come to an end, but the exquisite _pleasure_ of it seemed to increase exponentially with every thrust and counter-thrust, far too fragile to last, and Remus thought crazily that all three of them could be heading toward a magical cataclysm of such unbearable beauty that it might fuse them all into some new and unknown single entity.

But the furthest heights of orgasm, however heart-expanding, are always experienced alone. The coming critical mass of pleasure that Remus had guessed might overwhelm them all did occur, and it split the three of them off from one another momentarily, casting each temporarily adrift in his own private ecstasy. Remus could hear the effigy laughing somewhere through his dumbstruck haze, and a few moments later he heard Sirius laughing too, the way he always did. He himself took his own path third, silently, as was his particular inclination.

Some small breath of time after that, Remus heard the effigy laughing anew, laughing in both joy and almost childlike astonishment. Remus felt himself smiling. Sometimes … sometimes when things had been especially perfect between Sirius and himself, their combined pleasure would somehow exceed the sum of its parts, and all their delight would rush past the fleshly boundaries of their physical bodies. There was a delightful variety of surprising magical side effects; Remus' favorite was the spontaneous levitation.

Remus, listening to the effigy's gasping peals of astounded laughter, wondered if he and Sirius might have forgotten to mention that odd little idiosyncrasy to him in advance. Certainly it must seem a bit strange - even to a magical chimera-gone-wrong like the effigy – to come drifting out of the daze of orgasm only to find himself floating in midair about three feet above the bed. It was one thing to see a vague outline of that peculiar effect in the memories the effigy had borrowed from his creator; it must be another thing entirely for him to actually _do_ it in the flesh.

They all drifted back down toward the soft surface beneath them in time, sinking back into the mattress together in a warm welter of entangled limbs and the faint diminishing laughter of both Sirius and his copy. All bundled together like lazy kittens in a basket, Sirius on one side and Remus on the other, with the effigy sheltered between them. The three of them spent a peaceful stretch just resting, with the occasional soft grunt of satisfaction or pleased sigh being the only quiet communication among them. Eventually the effigy laughed aloud.

"What?" Sirius asked him, gently stroking his hair off of his forehead. "What's got you tickled?" Remus turned onto his side and raised his head a bit, so that he could see both of them.

The effigy smiled. "I was just thinking that you both could teach a class in Advanced Fucking at Hogwarts."

Sirius laughed so hard that they could feel the bed shaking under them, and Remus, who was struck by a vivid vision of himself being introduced at the traditional Opening Day Feast as the school's new Fucking Master, could not help but laugh as well.

"Good heavens," Sirius said, sitting up a bit and still laughing. "Just imagine the NEWTS!"

The three laughed together some more, and then subsided once again into a comfortable, sated, peace. Remus, despite his own pleased body and contented mind, could not quite shake the awareness that this peace too was as ephemeral as the effigy himself. That the clock, despite all they had done and perhaps would do later to fill the hours, was still ticking.

How many permutations of three-times-three were there?

Remus wondered if they could discover them all in the time they had. How many perfect hours were actually needed to make up a single proper life?

The effigy, nestled in the combined curves of their bodies, his magical, fleeting flesh surrounded by their flesh, looked up again at both of them, Remus and Sirius.

"What will we do now, Moony - Sirius?" he asked them, visibly trusting completely.

Sirius himself, Remus knew to his own mild regret, could never quite bring himself to do that. Though he was, to Remus' thinking, essentially a creature of absolutes, absolute trust had ever remained just a touch out of his reach. But Sirius' magical duplicate, perhaps by virtue of having no history of his own, had managed to correct this flaw in his maker's nature.

"What will we do next?" the effigy repeated, still completely relaxed and still clearly content to leave himself in their hands.

We'll cushion your advent and your passing too, with all the love we have, Remus thought silently.

But it was Sirius who spoke it aloud, thus delighting Remus and startling him badly at the same time.

"Why, what else _can_ we do? We'll fill the time we have the best way we can," Sirius said, and kissed the effigy again. "We'll seize the day."


	5. Chapter 5

5.

Some three hours later, just before dawn, three shrouded figures stood behind some rubbish bins in a dark and crooked back-alley in Knockturn and waited for the turn of time. At the preordained moment, a cool blue fire suddenly sprang up from the ashes of the magical figure at their feet and blazed into a bonfire, tall as a man.

Two of the figures were much of a height and the third was a bit smaller. One of the taller figures held the smaller one for a very long time in the blue firelight and the darkness, and perhaps, amongst the shadows, many last kisses were exchanged. The pair broke apart and then the two like figures came together, standing just apart from one another for a time, and then finally blending into a brief embrace.

"This is it," Sirius was saying to the effigy. "_This_ is the moment I've brought you to in the end. My 'gift' to you. Mortality. I wish I'd never even thought of this spell!"

The effigy put his hands on Sirius' face and tried to smooth the troubled, guilt-stricken frown off his features. "No, no, don't do that," he protested.

"Don't do what?" Sirius answered. "Don't tell you how sorry I am for this awful mistake? Don't tell you how _much_ I regret all my abysmal bungling?"

"Don't downplay your gift to me. _Life_, Sirius. You gave me a life. And a good one, too. I've never been afraid. I've never hurt. I've never known evil and my heart's never been broken. Can _you_ say the same?"

"And now it's over," Sirius countered, dodging the question. "Eleven _hours_! Some life!"

"Eleven perfect hours. I think life might not be life at all if it had no end."

Remus, listening to this final exchange between the created and the creator, asked _himself_ the question the effigy had raised. What _would_ life be if there was no end? What was it, exactly, that made the people one loved so very precious?

"I'm still sorry," Sirius was saying softly to the effigy, once more holding him tight.

"And I'm still grateful," the effigy replied, squeezing back. Then he released Sirius and stepped back a pace, and then turned toward the fire.

He gazed, for a moment, into the blue depths of the magical fire from which he had originally come. A sort of a doorway that, Remus was thinking, everyone living must eventually find and move through on his or her own.

The effigy smiled in the blue firelight. "What do you think, mates?" he asked. "Do you think it'll just be 'poof' – and that's it? Or do you think maybe there's some mystery still to be unraveled in there for me? Am I real enough for something _after_?"

You're real enough, Remus thought, remembering the first words the effigy had spoken to him, remembering the living reality of the effigy's body in his hands. But he found that he could not open his throat enough to say this aloud. Sirius too, he saw, also could not bear to try to answer.

"Good-bye, Sirius," the effigy said. Then he turned his face to Remus, one last time.

"Good-bye, Moony. I love you."

He turned toward the fire once more, and then, without any hesitation, deliberately stepped into the very center of it. Remus could see no trace of fear on his face among the flames, none at all. Some expression did cross his familiar features for a moment, as though he had just spotted something in the flames that Remus could not see, but Remus could not quite interpret its meaning; it could have been surprise, or anticipation, or relief, or even, possibly, discovery. But before Remus could make up his mind about what he'd seen, the blue bonfire blazed up, so bright it almost seemed to go white, and then whooshed inward all at once, collapsing in on itself. There was a final loud pop, and then the fire, the light, and the effigy himself were all _gone_, as though they had never been.

_Smoke and mirrors…_

A deep, desolate groan wrenched itself out of Remus' very guts, and he stumbled forward toward the empty space where the fire had been, hands outstretched and seeking. But then he felt the warm and solid touch of hands on him – the firm pressure of Sirius' hand on his shoulder, Sirius' restraining arm around his waist.

"Ah, no, Moony…" he heard Sirius murmuring to him, voice small and broken. "No, you mustn't. Don't. He's gone."

_Gone where_? Remus heard his own mind asking silently, desperately. _Gone where? Gone where? _

But there was no answer. There never is.

Remus blindly reached out and grasped at Sirius, pulling him close and crushing him in his arms, close against his own body. Remus held on to Sirius for what seemed forever, held onto him for dear life.

"I'm here," whispered Sirius, doing what he could to ease Remus, offering whatever comfort there was. "I'm here, I'm still here, it's all right, I'm here."

Remus held on, and, in time, he began to hear what Sirius was telling him, and finally, he began to believe it. Slowly, he relaxed enough to ease his death-grip on Sirius, and they both slid apart by a small fraction. Only enough to breathe, really, neither of them were willing, just yet, to completely let go.

"Did you … did you see that look on his face?" Remus asked Sirius at last. "Just before the … just before? What was it? Do you think he saw … _something_?"

"I _hope_ he did …" Sirius mumbled. "I'd like to think he could have."

"_I_ think he did," Remus finally decided aloud.

They were silent again for a time, and then Sirius sighed deeply.

"I'll never cast this spell again," he said.

Remus nodded. "Good," he said aloud.

After a moment or two more, Sirius put his arm around Remus' shoulders and squeezed, lightly.

"All right, then," he said, softly. "All right. Let's go home, Moony."


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Remus, only half awake in his bed, let loose a long, drawn-out exhalation of breath. He turned over on his side, letting his legs draw up close, curling his body into a loose 's' curve. The mental journey back through memory to a time some fourteen years past had comforted him in a way, but it had answered none of his questions, and, in fact, had re-raised old questions, just as it always did on those rare occasions when he permitted himself to recall it.

He pulled his pillow close to himself, holding it against his breast just as he might with a much-loved companion, and sighed as he let his eyes fall shut. And in the darkness behind his closed eyelids, he saw again the solitary halls of Grimmauld Place and the conclusion of his recurring dream, where it had been patiently waiting for him all along, just beyond the edge of sleep.

Remus walked on. Down the dark halls and up the gloomy corridors of a terrible old house that, over the course of the year just past, he had come to know far too well. Remus was walking the halls again, walking past and away from the seated form of Fenrir Greyback, walking out of the formal dining room that housed him, walking until the muted sounds of Greyback's soft muttering were muffled and then swallowed whole in the heavy, storm-laden air.

Remus walked on, and then, almost as if he had planned it, he came to the door of a solarium room, one floor above the basement kitchen. This room, Remus knew, had a flagstone floor, a glass ceiling, and a bank of tall, mullioned windows that looked out on the narrow courtyard at the back of the house. It had been a cold and cheerless place when Remus had known it in waking life, and it would be just as cold and cheerless here in dream, he was certain. But it was a room that had been meant, once, for sunshine and the nurturing of plants and all manner of living things, and Sirius had once told him that when he had been a small boy in this house, he and his brother Regulus had liked to play there.

Remus' heavy steps took him through the solarium door and into its interior, and he had to blink his eyes against the sudden contrast of light: the dark hall he had come from against the weak, greenish daylight flooding in through the glass roof and the tall windows. Few living plants or herbs or specimen trees remained in the solarium; that era in the history of the Black family was long past. Only a few of the older, larger urns and pots had never been moved, some still filled with old, used-up soil, one with the skeletal remains of a pomegranate tree. The last, tenacious creepers of an aged holly vine still clung about the eaves, a few drifts of dead leaves still littered the stone floors, and a single surviving pot of hyacinth bloomed with a kind of fragile, desperate beauty at the foot of one of the windows.

A creaky set of wicker chairs and tables, once painted a fresh white, still recalled a time when it might have been pleasant to sit in this room, to look out on the courtyard. Near the doors that led outside, a wicker swing-loveseat still hung on rusty chains, suspended from an a-frame.

The swing, Remus knew, had been Sirius' and Regulus' favorite. They had especially loved to sit in the swing together during rainy days, quietly playing gobstones or Serpents-and-Ladders or Exploding Snap, warm and dry while they watched the rain fall outside.

Remus gazed toward the swing, and saw that Sirius was sitting in it now, gazing out at the oppressive day beyond the windows, with all its leaden promise of a rain to come.

But this Sirius was no boy. Remus had not seen Sirius as a child since he himself had been a child, many years ago. But he had known and loved and stood beside this _man_, in this very house, through all the months of the last year, and he could more clearly recall these worn features and this marked face than he could the untouched bloom of Sirius' youth. Sirius, at the end of his life, had seemed more beautiful to Remus than he ever had at any time in their long combined past, and Remus had _always_ seen him as beautiful. Beautiful like the fading, blooming hyacinth at the window, like all things too precious to last.

Sirius had fallen just last year. Yet here he was now, sitting in the swing and waiting for the storm to break.

"It can't _be_," Remus breathed into the stillness of the room.

"Hullo, Moony," Sirius said, looking away from the window. "Haven't seen you here for a while. I'd hoped I might not see you again."

Remus nodded, and blinked a bit because his eyes were burning. "But you're not _really_ alive, are you? You couldn't be. It's just this blasted dream. It keeps coming back."

"Well, I think _you_ may be the one who keeps coming back," Sirius answered. "But I expect one of these days you won't need to anymore. Come on over here and have a seat anyway. I've missed you."

Remus drifted across the cold stone of the floor and then sat down in the swing beside Sirius. The seat swung a bit as he settled his weight into it and the chains that suspended the swing creaked in protest.

"Ugh!" Sirius said. "What an awful sound. You must tell Harry to burn this horrible old mausoleum down, when he gets around to it. Better sow the razed earth with salt too, just to be on the safe side. How has he been?"

Remus smiled, a bit grimly. "Busy. He's had to pack a lot of growing up into a rather limited space. You … you do know about Dumbledore?"

Sirius nodded. "I know everything you know. I'm always around. As you know perfectly well, you sly thing."

"Ah. Well. The ones who love us…" Remus said.

"Never truly leave us. Since they've built their houses in our hearts, I suppose. Maybe it's more a case of us never truly leaving them."

"Sirius? Are you solid? Real?" Remus asked.

"Try me."

Remus reached across the small space between them and took one of Sirius' hands into his own. It both baffled him and thrilled him beyond all measure to feel the warm weight of that hand in his again, as real to the touch as he had ever known it.

"Perfectly solid," Remus pronounced, smiling a little.

"Yes, for now. But not for long, I'm afraid. It's just a dream."

"All smoke and mirrors," Remus agreed softly. "I was thinking about that weird spell you cast that one time, tonight, do you remember that? All those years ago?"

Sirius laughed. "Of course I remember. I used to be the Wizard Who Walks _Into_ Walls. What a disaster!"

"But it worked, all the same. It foxed the Death Eaters, anyway, just like you thought it would. Or the effigy you made foxed 'em."

"And now, it appears _I'm_ the effigy _you_ made. He kept trying to tell us that it was a _good_ life, remember that? But we couldn't quite believe him."

"I'm trying to believe, Sirius. I really am still trying."

Sirius smiled gently and stroked Remus' cheek. "I know you are. And you can do it, too, Moony. You'll be all right."

"Born survivor, that's me," Remus said.

"Don't be bitter. It's not good for you. I'll tell you just like my effigy told you, it really was a good life. You _know_ that's true, or you'd never be able to bring me here, not like this."

"Seize the day?"

"Why not? What other clever strategy do you propose?"

Remus laughed aloud. "Ah, Paddy, how I've missed you. Will you still be here – if I need to – see you again?"

Sirius put his hand on Remus chest, directly over his heart. "I'm always here, even when you don't need to see me. You _will_ come to believe that, in time."

"It's just … it's just so hard, Sirius. It's just … such a _struggle_."

"The human condition. Nothing is ever enough. We tried to make the effigy understand _that_, didn't we? But he couldn't quite believe _us_. I'm sorry it has to be so hard for you, Remus."

"But I'll catch up with you one day. You may have had a head start, but I'll catch up."

"But that's the one thing that doesn't have to be a struggle at all. Your time will come too, and you'll never have to seek to find it. It'll just happen in the natural order of things. You'll catch up because I won't be running when you come, Moony. I'll be waiting. We'll all be waiting."

Remus pressed his own hand over Sirius' where it rested on his heart. "Do you promise me that? Do promise? You'll wait for me and you'll never go on to whatever there is without me? No matter how long it takes? No matter how much I may live on without you? Will you still remember, even after this dream stops recurring and I don't keep popping by to remind you? Will you remember me, even when _I_ forget?"

"Are you so afraid you will, then? Is that what's bothering you?"

"I'm _so_ afraid that I'm forgetting, Sirius. Forgetting everything. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can't see your face anymore, not like I used to."

Sirius grinned. "Oh, Moony, you thick pillock. You're not _forgetting_. It's just getting so it doesn't hurt so much to remember. What was my owl's name, when we were thirteen?"

"Bob," Remus answered automatically. "You _loathed_ him."

"What was I wearing, the first time you ever saw me?"

"Stiff midnight blue robes with a velvet collar. You looked like a right little potentate, too, all dressed up like an organ grinder's monkey – the only first year on the platform in full dress robes. And you were covered in mud."

Sirius barked, laughing. "Well, I had to do _something_ about that ridiculous outfit my mum made me wear! Honestly, you can't imagine how hard it was to summon an entire mud-puddle just so I could 'fall' into it."

"I do remember!" Remus exclaimed, relieved and delighted. "I remember _everything_."

"Of course you do," Sirius answered. He turned his hand on Remus' breast and closed it around Remus' hand, then pressed them both together back over Remus' heart. "It's all right here, Moony. I'm always right _here_. You're never _really_ alone."

Remus smiled as he listened, for a moment, to the sound of his own heart beating.

"So you _do_ promise then," he said to Sirius. "You will be waiting for me when I come?"

"I solemnly swear," Sirius answered, smiling.

"Ah. Well then. I suppose that's settled."

"You worry too much. Care for a game of gobstones? Reggie and I used to play in here for hours. Especially when there was a storm like this one coming."

"Yes, I remember you telling me that. But I think I'll pass on the gobstones. I always thought that game was deadly boring, to be quite honest."

"Maybe it helps to be under ten years old. Serpents-and-Ladders?"

Remus grinned. "I don't think so."

"Shall we just wait for the storm, then?"

"That sounds just about right," Remus said, and moved close enough to Sirius to lean against him, a little. They both looked out the windows to the grey day beyond, and after a while, Sirius slipped his arm around Remus' shoulders.

Remus' recurring dream went on, and as he sat with his dream-Sirius in their dream-swing and waited for the dream-storm to break at last, it occurred to Remus that it might be a long while before he would visit this particular dream again. As Sirius had said, perhaps it really was just getting so it didn't hurt so much to remember.

The storm finally broke, just as it had been threatening to do all through this dream and all through all the other, like dreams that it had loomed in. The skies opened and rain poured down in sheets over the glass ceiling and tall windows of the solarium that Remus had never, in waking life, actually been in with Sirius, not once in the whole time they had lived at Grimmauld Place together.

But he was with Sirius now, now and forever. Remus was suddenly struck by the idea that some themes in life had an odd way of recurring, in just the same way dreams could.

The two of them sat beside one another and watched the rain fall until the dream faded into the black, the way all dreams do, and Remus finally slept the rest of the night away in a deep, dark, and ultimately dreamless sleep.

The End


End file.
